Into the Dark season 1, episode 1 recap: ‘The Body’

On the new Hulu series Into the Dark, a hitman has to transport the body of his latest contract across town on Halloween night but gets held up when his car is vandalized and his tires slashed.

He is forced to enlist the help of some inept party-goers and gets more trouble than he bargained for.

Wilkes (Tom Bateman), a professional hitman, has just completed his latest contract. Whoever it is, its made very clear from his house and lifestyle that he is very rich, and it turns out very well known.

Get ready, because the scariest thing about this episode is when Wilkes eats a piece of the Sardinian casu marzu (“rotten cheese”) that’s sitting out on the counter. Wilkes has four hours to deliver the body, which on any other night should be more than enough time.

But tonight is Halloween, which makes it easier in one sense because Wilkes can drag around the wrapped up body out in the open as if its part of a costume, but ends up being more difficult when he discovers his car has been vandalized and his tires slashed. Now he needs a ride and a way of avoiding police suspicion.

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Enter the most annoying people you’ll ever meet. Alan Morgan-Adams (David Hull) “of the Massachusetts Morgan-Adamses”, Dorothy (Aurora Perrineau), and Nick (Harvey Guillen) are on their way to a fancy Halloween party and want to make a grand entrance using Wilkes’ “costume”. Wilkes hesitantly agrees to go for one drink in return for a ride.

This swanky trust-fund party is played by a douchey character named Jack (Ray Santiago) who lives to impress people with his money and charm. Wilkes also meets Maggie (Rebecca Rittenhouse), who is dressed as Marie Antoinette and is attracted to Wilkes’ cynical philosophies on modern society.

Maggie works as a coder for Jack and asks to borrow his car to help Wilkes, but first, they are invited into Jack’s private escape-room where they quickly discover that Wilkes’ costume is not a costume.

Nick gets murdered, Wilkes and Maggie get trapped in the escape room, and Dorothy, Alan, and Jack take the body and look for help. While “Team Corpse” bumble around trying to figure out what’s best to do, Maggie finds herself intrigued and attracted to Wilkes and his dangerous persona.

Together they escape and corner Team Corpse just as they’ve enlisted the help of a nearby policeman, who Wilkes immediately kills. Seeing this coming, Team Corpse gets a head start and evades Wilkes.

It quickly becomes clear that Maggie is intending to help Wilkes and together they begin to frame Team Corpse for the murder, leading them to decide to dispose of the body.

While Team Corpse break into a hardware store and look up the instructions on the internet, Maggie tracks their location from their cell phones by using a borrowed/stolen computer at a nearby bar while she works on seducing Wilkes. She finds his philosophy of life thrilling and freeing, his idea that he can do anything he wants because nothing really matters.

Maggie’s attraction and loyalty to Wilkes is troubling and problematic. She’s already proven from certain comments that she’s an intelligent woman who is aware of patriarchal oppression and she owns a small, practical gun to protect herself from potential male threats.

Maggie is smart enough, cynical enough, and cautious enough to know that if a man hurts other people that he will eventually hurt her.

No matter how much someone says they love you, you will not be excluded from their cruelty – but somehow the fact that Wilkes hasn’t killed her yet is proof enough to her that he won’t. I can see this getting messy for her as soon as she’s outlived her usefulness.

Team Corpse quickly realizes that the Wikipedia entry on “how to dispose of a body” isn’t as helpful as they’d hoped and decide to take the corpse to a mortuary instead to cremate it.

The body has started bleeding through its wrappings, so Wilkes and Maggie can easily follow the trail from the hardware shop to the mortuary. Now that he’s caught up to Team Corpse, this is where Wilkes stabs Maggie and leaves her for dead.

Of course, we don’t see her die, and she’s still holding on to that small gun of hers, so that will likely come back to haunt him. He continues on to infiltrate the mortuary and killing off Team Corpse one by one, despite their best efforts to fortify and protect themselves.

Wilkes gets the body to the location just in time, but just as predicted, Maggie shows up and shoots him in the heart. Despite having been stabbed by a professional hitman – who you would think would know how to fatally stab someone – she somehow survives her wounds and walks away.

She wraps him up and drags him through town to a dumpster, explaining to anyone who wonders that it’s part of her costume.

I realize that this episode is meant to be more humorous than scary, but it fell flat as a thriller and floundered as a comedy. The comedy was lame and the plot predictable.

Everyone in it was obnoxious and asinine, Maggie was delusional, and Wilkes was dull. Even Dorothy, who was a fairly reasonable and headstrong woman ended up being the kind of trash who would steal an innocent person’s bicycle.

I was thoroughly bored by the whole thing.